>> Michael Morris: There’s 21,640 men and women who have dedicated their lives to keeping
the lights on in the 11 states that we do business...
[pause]
>>Jorgen Vig Knudstorp: You’ve got to make sure you have a strong organization that’s
capable of making the decisions it needs to make...
[pause]
>>Vint Cerf: The other thing that Google has done remarkably well is to hire smart people...
>>V/O Human resources.
Human capital.
The people people.
Have you said ‘if you want a job done properly, do it yourself’ more than twice this year?
HR have the solution.
More than a quicksand of red flags, law suits and pointless rules.
Done right, HR is a game changer...
Like every business discipline, HR has its thinkers.
The people who change the definition of what’s expected.
When David Fairhurst joined McDonald’s, the fast food giant was in the news for all
the wrong reasons.
McJobs, McLibel and McMorgan Spurlock.
>>David Fairhurst: I experienced that at most dinner parties that I went to where people,
good or bad, would have an opinion...
>>V/O: Most people had a very bad opinion about McJobs in particular, and the people
that were in them.
David, however, saw something else.
>>David Fairhurst: That was at odds with the pride, the commitment and the training that
I saw when I came inside this organization.
Turning that around was – and is – a huge task.
But while the rehabilitation of the golden arches may not be complete, profits and perceptions
are on the up.
It started, says David, by addressing the issue of what HR calls itself.
For years if not a decade HR’s been very self-indulgent around what it calls itself,
whether it deserves a seat at the table and quite frankly it needs to earn its seat at
the table and in my view needs to be less self-indulgent about looking at its name and
its purpose.
What HR should be talking about rather than what it calls itself is around, “How do
you truly understand what it is that your business needs?
What’s the engine around people that drives your business performance?
How can you get more sales and profitability from people?”
Then secondly, “What is it that your people truly value about working for you organization
to really understand what it is that differentiates you as an employer?”
>>V/O: Bring those two things together, says David, and you create an energy that can be
released around your people.
And when you do that, the HR department can talk about...
>>David Fairhurst: What is the future talent needs of our organization?
How can we generate better insight around people?
How can we get rid of organizational silos that destroy progress in an organization?
How can we support change in business?
How do we support leaders in terms of integrity, values based leadership?”
V/O: This program may not yet be offering a completely balanced diet, but Misty Reich,
HR Director for KFC, agrees with David.
>>Misty Reich: First you need to understand what is it that
the business is trying to accomplish?
What is the core strategy?
And then from that point do you start talking about how the people resources in that business
can drive towards that.
>>V/O: One of HR’s many key roles is to ensure continuity in an organisation: non-incremental
change to encourage progress, incremental change to encourage growth, fresh blood and
steady hands.
It is a difficult balancing act, and one which toy manufacturer Mattel focussed on intently
following some acquisition-based culture shock.
>>Alan Kaye: Even Fisher Price, that had been an acquisition for earlier, had a very – its
own and distinct culture.
We had just bought the American Goal Company in Madison, Wisconsin, had its own and distinct
culture.
And it was very disjointed.
And it’s very hard to develop people in an environment like that.
And I think that’s what we were facing.
So, early on, the key was, “How do we create, without destroying the individual entrepreneurship
that was going on in these locations?”
>>V/O: One part of the solution was a process Mattel call...
>>Alan Kaye: The quality of organization review.
>>V/O: Every year, the senior management from all divisions, with their heads of HR, present
to Alan and Mattel’s CEO.
>>Alan Kaye: How their organization is doing, what their organization issues are, who are
the key people, who are the people at the very senior levels, and who are behind them.
We have these extensive reviews going on, and as you can imagine, if that’s going
on at the senior-most level of the organization, it filters down.
So, it’s going on through the organization.
And then, we take that review, Mr. Eckert and myself, and we do this with the board,
probably twice a year, where we review the senior-most talent of the organization with
the board.
So, they know who they are.
They get to see them during presentations.
So, we really make this succession planning process that we have very, very much a piece
of everything we do here.
>>V/O: At McDonald’s, David Fairhurst believes succession planning is also integral to the
business – but not in its current, most common form...
>>David Fairhurst: The reality is that that is not dynamic enough to meet the ongoing
needs of the organization.
What you need to be doing is to be thinking about strategic workforce planning.
So in other words what are the operational income drivers of your organization over the
next, say, three to five years working in a non-silo way with your business intelligence,
your business strategy people to figure out what’s going to drive the profitability
then very simply to map your talent capability against those drivers of the business.
So my call really is if you’re going to meet the business needs both now and in the
future we need to be far more dynamic, fluid if you like and non-siloed in the way in which
we approach talent in organizations and that requires I think a different attitude towards
talent.
>>V/O: But with a word of warning, here’s Alan Kaye.
Be careful what you wish for...
>>Alan Kaye: I would say that, early on, hiring in a maybe senior manager and above, we’d
probably hire-in from the outside about 75-percent of the talent coming from the outside of the
organization.
There was almost a philosophy of, you know, you need new blood, you need new ideas.
Bring it in from the outside, versus develop from within.
We needed to turn that around.
And we spent a lot of time with leadership development.
We spend a lot of time in succession planning, now, understanding who’s ready for the next
move, what do they need, and when?
And we’ve really come full circle.
Now, we’re about – I’d say, we’re about 90-percent promotions are from within,
10-percent from the outside.
And, as an HR professional, I would say we’ve swung the pendulum a little too far.
>>V/O: That you should always invest in your people may sound like a no-brainer, but...
>>David Fairhurst: Well you get a lot of people over the years say, “If you invest in people
they leave the organization how do you get a return on your investment?”
>>V/O: When the truth of the matter is...
>>David Fairhurst: The more you give people transferrable skills the less likely they
are to transfer.
>>V/O: For a frankly brilliant example of what can be achieved when you strive for best
practice and are creative with your investment in people, we move from potato chips to silicon,
from Big Mac to Big Blue, from – oh, enough of that.
IBM has combined leadership training and social responsibility to incredible effect.
>>Stan Litow: In a tour of the IBM research facilities I saw a number of tools that from
my experience in the public sector and in the voluntary sector might be particularly
significant in addressing a variety of different social problems that were among the most difficult
for people to grapple with.
What was clear to me at IBM is that we had some unique capabilities, and again our innovation
and our technology, but then clearer and clearer to me it was our people, the talent within
our company, the people who had significant amount of engineering talent, business consulting
talent, software developers, researchers, and that was really a unique capability that
could be coupled with innovation and technology to bring about substantive change.
>>V/O: The result?
The A corporate peace corps, or corporate service corps, to give it the correct IBM
title.
And this is what great HR can do for your business...
>>Stan Litow: A corporate service corps, and yes we do characterize it as a corporate version
of the Peace Corps, is fundamentally about leadership and leadership development.
We have seen a shift in our business model to become a fully globally integrated enterprise,
and what that means is there’s a greater premium for people operating on a global stage.
You need a much greater cultural understanding.
You need to understand teaming skills in ways that are at a much higher level, and what
the corporate service corps offers to our best emerging leaders within the company,
this is 500 people selected in a very competitive way over each year, and they’re assigned
in teams of 8-10 in communities in Nigeria or Ghana or Tanzania or Vietnam or the Philippines
or Egypt or Romania, and they work as a team living together, working on a critical social
problem, usually connected to economic growth, job development, using their technical skills,
working as a team of people from the U.S., from Canada, from the UK, from China, from
India, from Africa, working together and solving a critical problem in their assignment.
So at the end of that process what we’ve identified is people have completely improved
their teaming skills, their cultural adaptability, their understanding of growth markets, their
understanding of the relationship between government, business, and the not-for-profit
sector.
So it’s a way of building the most sophisticated level of leadership in the next generation
of your leader.
>>V/O: And that’s not even the best of it...
>>Stan Litow: Then there’s another advantage that perhaps you might not have thought about
going into it.
An independent evaluation done by the Harvard Business School, 100 percent of the participants
in the corporate service corps indicated that participation in this program increased their
likelihood of completing their career at IBM.
We’re talking about top talent, and if you talk within HR departments not just at IBM
but in most companies, your top performers who have been with a company for seven or
ten years are those that you’re most at risk of losing if somehow they don’t feel
excited and motivated about their work, and nothing could be more exciting or motivating
to an IBM young emerging leader than participation in the corporate service corps.
>>V/O:And those are the MeetTheBoss tv first three of our top ten HR best practices.
In part two, why David Fairhurst kept referring to...
Organizational silos that destroy progress in an organization?
>>V/O:And the business changing power of practical HR metrics.